Basic Trope: Game's difficulty is not directly dependent on game's process or any kind of game's mechanic.
- Straight: Some levels are quite difficult or easy for no reason.
- Exaggerated:
- Difficulty of levels is interchangeable annoyingly hard or stupidly easy.
- Game difficulty is changing drastically after each second of level.
- Downplayed: Game is getting easier or harder, but because it's the story that decides the difficulty, and there is generally some forewarning that it will be more difficult or easy, it's not as glaring.
- Justified:
- The first level was highly fortified by the Evil Overlord and the next level is easy because everyone thinks that you died in the first level.
- every level is generated on the fly.
- Inverted: The difficulty is constant or increasing or decreasing through whole game.
- Subverted: At the beginning difficulty looks random, but later is increasing in proportion to game's progress.
- Double Subverted: ...but only for some moment.
- Parodied: First level is almost impossible to clear without using cheats. You easily die on one hit, there are many invisible enemies or/and traps, hero is utterly weak and overall design sucks. Next level abounds infinite 1-ups, the best weapon and armor in this game and you grant invincibility. Then again difficulty is suddenly high, and previously gotten items are now useless.
- Zig Zagged: Trope is once time subverted, and other double subverted.
- Averted: Game's difficulty is not dependent game's process or any kind of game's mechanic, but difficulty is constant and it isn't increasing or decreasing.
- Enforced:
- Creators tried make level fitting to actual place.
- Creator was lazy with balancing the levels.
- Or, if this is a beta, he hasn't gotten around to it yet.
- Lampshaded: "Difficulty of this game makes no sense, doesn't it?"
- Invoked: The Big Bad took his guards out of the area as to make Bob overconfident so that he loses on the next level.
- Exploited: Bob uses the easy parts to Level Grind.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Most of players get annoyed, because of sudden difficulty change, so they drop it.
- Reconstructed: Even if the most of the players drop it , others stay playing the game exactly because its bizarre difficulty and inexistent sense of logic.
Back to Schizophrenic Difficulty
